Why young Americans are ditching church, not values
Nearly 40 million Americans have left church in the last 25 years. This shift and the coming dethroning of Christianity as the country’s largest religion is fueled by young Americans, who increasingly say they are unaffiliated with religion.
While young Americans are leading the exodus from the church, they’re not ditching their values. The bath water may be gone, but they’re keeping the metaphorical baby.
Data from various public opinion research groups like Pew Research Center, the Public Religion Research Institute and the Barna Group have been documenting America’s shift away from Christianity. New data from Pew released this month found that people who aren’t affiliated with a religion are still deeply concerned about moral and spiritual issues.
Pew found a majority of religious nones, which includes people who say they are an atheist, agnostic or practice “nothing in particular,” still believe in a higher power (56%) and another 13% said they believe in the God described in the Bible, but are not involved in regular religious services.
“After years of asking myself why I became religious, I know the answer: I wanted to know how to be a good person, and I believed then, wrongly, that religion and God were essential for understanding right and wrong well enough to live a moral life,” said Michael Glawson, a philosophy professor at the University of Charleston, in a 2022 Medium post.
While not practicing religion is viewed as one of the least desirable characteristics of a potential son or daughter-in-law, according to a survey by the American Sociological Review, folks who leave the faith are still active in their communities and participate in spiritual practices. Atheists and agnostics tend to volunteer and participate in civic life at rates matching or exceeding religiously affiliated people, according to the Pew data.
Here are three value-based reasons why young Americans are leaving church:
Scandals across various sects of Christianity
More than a quarter of Americans who left their religion (27%) told PRRI they did so because they were disillusioned by public scandals within their religion.
Among the growing number of young Latinos leaving religion, the religious group that shrunk the most was Catholics, according to Pew data released last year. Despite declines, Catholicism remains the majority religion for Latinos, especially those who were born outside America and those who speak only or mostly Spanish.
Some young American parents active on reddit forums like r/exmormon and r/exchristian who left the faith consider church an unsafe place for them to take their children. Many commenters cite the sexual abuse scandals that seem to touch every denomination from Catholicism to Mormonism to the Southern Baptist Church.
“Many Millennial and Gen Z parents feel that leaving their kids in the care of a clergyman is like eating a baggie of Skittles in which just a few are laced with cyanide, and you can’t tell which ones,” said Elanor Rice, a writer documenting her experience as an atheist in the Deep South, in a Medium post published in December 2022.
Bad experiences with religious organizations or people
When asked why they did not identify with a religion, a majority of respondents (55%) told Pew it was either a dislike of religious organizations or a bad experience with religious people was the reason why they did not affiliate with religion. In 2021, church attendance among Americans fell below 50% for the first time since polling group Gallup started tracking this statistic in 1937.
In her debut book, “Empty the Pews,” author Crissy Stroop documented the stories of people who left church. The majority of these stories had something to do with the church leadership as a whole or the experiences brought by one or a few bad experiences with church members or leaders.
“Having a talented and diverse group of writers craft powerful personal essays about surviving authoritarian and abusive Christian Right upbringings could be a way to tell the world that we are not just statistics, that we have voices that deserve to be heard,” Stroop said in an interview published by Religion Dispatches in 2019.
While religious are leaving church because of their own negative experiences, religious nones are divided on the benefits of religion. Overall, 43% of “nones” say religion does more harm than good in society, while 14% say it does more good than harm; 41% say religion does equal amounts of good and harm, the Pew data found.
The church’s treatment of LGBTQ people
Religion’s relationship with LGBTQ Americans has been rocky, and young Americans have noticed. PRRI found 30% of respondents who left their religion did so because they were turned off by religion’s teachings about LGBTQ people.
The United Methodist Church has been feuding over affirming queer Christians since 2019 when the denomination said congregations could disaffiliate if they didn’t agree on sexuality. Nearly one-fifth of Methodist churches voted to leave the denomination over its official stance on human sexuality, which says “sexual relations are affirmed only with the covenant of monogamous, heterosexual marriage.”
Young Americans are also far more likely to be part of the LGBTQ+ community or support political efforts focused on LGBTQ+ rights. More than one-quarter (28%) of Gen Z adults say they are LGBTQ, according to PRRI data released this month.
A 2020 study that examined declining religiosity among young Christians found queer churchgoers were nearly two times more likely to leave the church. The study, published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, also found that those who left the church still prayed and considered prayer a way of “doing Christianity how I want to.”
While some queer believers leave the church on their own will, others are forced out after their sexual preference was revealed to church leaders. Kevin Garcia, a queer pastor and author of “Bad Theology Kills,” has been open about his experience being denied any spiritual leadership within a non-affirming church.
“People can’t seem to comprehend that a queer person could care deeply about the teachings and the life of Jesus and trying to emulate that here on earth,” he said in a YouTube video posted last fall about why he left church.
What’s next?
An increasing number of churches affirm LGBTQ believers and clergy members, and data suggests more acceptance makes everyone feel more welcome.
A 2023 study published in the Journal of Psychology and Theology found churches that affirm LGBTQ+ believers in their congregations made both queer and straight churchgoers feel more welcome than churches that only affirm sexual relationships between people in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage.
The study further charged churches to observe how their theology affects queer people.
“First, churches play a role in the wellbeing of LGBTQ+people, regardless of whether these churches intend to do so. Second, non-affirming theology contributes to lower self-esteem, higher psychological distress, and increased health risk behaviors such as excessive drinking in LGBTQ+youth that can last a lifetime—the opposite of what many non-affirming Christian leaders claim to want for LGBTQ+Christians,” authors Juan Carlos Hugues and Steven V. Rouse said in the paper.